Smells like inhibition: The effects of olfactory and visual alcohol cues on inhibitory control

Psychopharmacology, Mar 2016

Rationale How the smell of alcohol impacts alcohol-related thoughts and behaviours is unclear, though it is well-documented that alcohol-related stimuli and environments may trigger these. Objectives The current study, therefore, aimed to investigate the priming effects of both visual and olfactory alcohol cues on inhibitory control. Method Forty individuals (M age = 23.65, SD = 6.52) completed a go/no-go association task (GNAT) which measured reaction times, response accuracy and false alarm rates whilst being exposed to alcohol-related (or neutral) olfactory and visual cues. Results Alcohol-related visual cues elicited lower false alarm rates, slower reaction times and higher accuracy rates relative to neutral pictorial cues. False alarm rates were significantly higher for those exposed to alcohol as opposed to neutral olfactory cues. Conclusions By highlighting that exposure to alcohol-related olfactory cues may impede response inhibition, the results indicate that exposure to such stimuli may contribute to the activation of cognitive responses which may drive consumption.

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs00213-016-4221-1.pdf

Smells like inhibition: The effects of olfactory and visual alcohol cues on inhibitory control

Psychopharmacology Smells like inhibition: The effects of olfactory and visual alcohol cues on inhibitory control R. L. Monk 0 J. Sunley 0 A. W. Qureshi 0 D. Heim 0 0 Edge Hill University , St Helens Rd, Ormskirk L39 4QP , UK Rationale How the smell of alcohol impacts alcohol-related thoughts and behaviours is unclear, though it is welldocumented that alcohol-related stimuli and environments may trigger these. Objectives The current study, therefore, aimed to investigate the priming effects of both visual and olfactory alcohol cues on inhibitory control. Method Forty individuals (M age = 23.65, SD = 6.52) completed a go/no-go association task (GNAT) which measured reaction times, response accuracy and false alarm rates whilst being exposed to alcohol-related (or neutral) olfactory and visual cues. Results Alcohol-related visual cues elicited lower false alarm rates, slower reaction times and higher accuracy rates relative to neutral pictorial cues. False alarm rates were significantly higher for those exposed to alcohol as opposed to neutral olfactory cues. Conclusions By highlighting that exposure to alcohol-related olfactory cues may impede response inhibition, the results indicate that exposure to such stimuli may contribute to the activation of cognitive responses which may drive consumption. Alcohol; Inhibition; Cues; Olfactory; Context; GNAT - The pairing of the psychological and physiological effects of alcohol consumption with related paraphernalia, people or places can lead to conditioned responses to such stimuli, in the absence of the substance (Rohsenow et al. 1990) . The presentation of such stimuli (e.g. the sight of an alcoholic beverage) has been shown to trigger such responses in both clinical and non-clinical populations (e.g. Cooney et al. 1987; Kenny et al. 2006; Nees et al. 2012; Siegel 2001; Traylor et al. 2011; see also Glautier et al. 1992; Kambouropoulos and Staiger 2001; Ramirez et. al. 2014) . These include physiological arousal (Kenny 2007; Sinha et al. 2009) , such as increased salivation (Rohsenow et al. 1994), electro dermal activity (Garland et al. 2012; Stormark et al. 1993) , and heart rate (Ingjaldsson et al. 2003). Exposure to substance-related cues and environments has also been found to be related to changes in alcohol consumption (Monk et al. 2015) , as well as related cognitions (Monk and Heim 2013a, b, 2014) , relapse (e.g. Carter and Tiffany 1999; Marlatt 1990; Siegel 2005; Zironi et al. 2006) and craving (Conklin and Tiffany 2002; Courtney and Ray 2014; Modell and Mountz 1995) . Such findings are in keeping with the notion that substance-related cues not only involuntarily capture people’s attention but also automatically trigger arousal associations (Field and Cox 2008; Wiers et al. 2002) . Accordingly, alcohol-salient environments can be important contextual moderators of attentional biases, as has been demonstrated in both clinical (Field et al. 2014) and non-clinical groups (Albery et al. 2015) . For instance, light drinkers are passively exposed to high levels of alcohol-related cues in their everyday lives (e.g. by spending much of their time in bars/pubs), whilst heavy drinkers are actively engaged with the alcoholrelated cues in their environment (when drinking). As such, light drinkers display higher levels of attentional bias towards alcohol-related words (passive cues) in comparison to heavy drinkers. Specifically, in contrast to light drinkers, heavy drinkers are actively involved in alcohol consumption, meaning they display high levels of alcohol-related attentional interference, regardless of how much time they spend in alcohol-related contexts. Further attentional interference in response to passive cue exposure is thus not evident (Albery et al. 2015) . It is therefore apparent that alcohol-related attentional biases fluctuate and are shaped by exposure to the contextual cues that individuals encounter in everyday life. Context can therefore influence the degree of attentional bias individuals have towards alcohol. Inhibition controls the strength of alcohol-related attentional biases (Field and Cox 2008) and is one of the processes believed to underlie the aetiology of addictive behaviours (Wiers et al. 2002) . Inhibitory control relies on a limited resource (Inzlicht and Berkman 2015; Muraven and Baumeister 2000) which may be overwhelmed in the presence of motivational alcohol cues (although see Monti and Rohsenow 1999 for cue exposure therapy). Indeed, it has been suggested that higher levels of impulsiveness and lower inhibitory control are associated with stronger cue-elicited cravings for alcohol in clinical samples (Papachristou et al. 2013) . Changes in inhibitory control responses during exposure to alcohol-related pictorial cues have also been observed. Specifically, in a go/no-go task, participants appear to make more commission errors (false alarm rate; FAR) when no-go stimuli are super-imposed on al (...truncated)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs00213-016-4221-1.pdf

R. L. Monk, J. Sunley, A. W. Qureshi, D. Heim. Smells like inhibition: The effects of olfactory and visual alcohol cues on inhibitory control, Psychopharmacology, 2016, pp. 1331-1337, Volume 233, Issue 8, DOI: 10.1007/s00213-016-4221-1